Opened route lies outside DEM and will be ignored

[CarlosAug]

I am trying to load a route from the Florida GIS database in a form of a Shapefile. I have the correct DEM at 10m and I can load the georef raster map fine. But when I try to load a route I get the following message "Opened route lies outside DEM and will be ignored" I can open the shapefile fine with Qgis. I have tried to export it to GPS and DFX and the route wont load. I am a loss here can someone please provide some guidance. The url for the shapefile is : ftp://146.201.97.137/dlg/revised_shapef ... 220rrs.dbf ftp://146.201.97.137/dlg/revised_shapef ... 220rrs.shp and ftp://146.201.97.137/dlg/revised_shapef ... 220rrs.shx

Thanks!

[geophil]

What coordinate system does this shapefile have?

[CarlosAug]

Shapefile is WGS84 - The DEM is UTM/WGS84, I am not a professional on this at all, but I do suspect that there is some difference and that is the cause of my problems. However I was able to open a NAD83 on the same WGS84 DEM on TransDem.

[geophil]

I opened the shapefile in my development environment in debug mode. The first coordinate pair I encountered is [529409.96, 1332907.12], 6 digit x and 7 digit y. Definitely not lat/long WGS84, the default for shapefiles. Looks like UTM at first glance, the easting (x) could match. But the northing would lie way south of Florida. UTM Northing of Tampa is about 3100000, Everglades 2800000, Tallahassee 3400000. UTM coordinates are in meters.

[CarlosAug]

Thanks for your reply and all your help. Funny thing is that I opened the shape files with the example given in the qgis tutorial. When I apply the layer it places the routes way out in central Africa. So yes I would guess the numbers are way off. Those are not my files but the ones provided by the State of Florida. They have a detailed rail section of the Uceta yard. Do you know how can I alter the change those coordinates?

[geophil]

You could try to look for the data in standard lat/long WGS84 coordinates. It appears that the current file uses a coordinate system unknown to us at the moment. Several US states have specific state coordinate systems with the advantage of having only one zone. But they are not that common and TransDEM, unfortunately, supports none of them.

[SharkNose]

I live in New Jersey and indeed we do have our own state plane coordinate system (SPCS). Some of the bigger states have multiple SPCS zones. Florida as I see has three - an East, West and North zone! Do a search in Google for "Florida state plane coordinate system" and you may find online conversion tools to convert the local SPCS to Lat/Long or even UTM coordinates.